We all survived the play last weekend, remarkably. Thursday night was easily the worst opening night of my entire experience, and that is counting Pajama Game when we had a grand total of three people in the audience. We still put on a better show then, even though energy was down the bog. Thursday of Eyrbyggja Saga included more thrown lines than all of my previous years in theatre put together- we probably ad-libbed about forty percent of it, and it just felt dead. It was like having one last, astonishingly bad dress rehearsal.
The old adage that a bad dress means a good run has some logic: a bad dress rehearsal usually scares the shit out of the actors, who then really haul ass for opening. I guess you could say we were just a day behind, because Friday night’s performance was hot. We were dead on, the dropped lines could be counted on one hand, and the energy was through the roof. This was our smallest audience, but the largest group of people we knew- lots of last year’s Lords who are still in or around York came. Saturday was an overly full house and another awesome performance, and the audience was fantastic. We finally seemed to have learned all our lines, got in character, and found the balance of performing and drinking that worked. (I don’t normally advocate drinking during a show- in fact, normally I am dead against it. This show, however, all the rules were chucked out the window long ago, because if our directors insisted on not caring and behaving as unprofessionally as possible, I didn’t see any reason to twist myself into pretzels trying to be even the way I naturally am. I was also sorely in need of a drink, at least Thursday, just to keep my homicidal rages at bay. So James and I went through a bottle of mead each night. At least it’s the drink of the period we were portraying. And, no, we did not go for accuracy and drink it out of horns- I will never be able to use a drinking horn as long as a live, because I can still remember the way Jon’s smelled at James and Adrienne’s wedding party last year. Ugh.)
We had the cast party at Murton after the Saturday show- bonfires in the longhouse and out in the common, with marshmallows and sausages; James brought a whistle and Fernando a drum, so we had improvisational music and danced around the fire and probably got a spiritually closer to the people we were portraying than we ever managed in the show. It wasn’t a late-running thing, thankfully, because it had been one hell of a week and I was exhausted, but it was a nice location. I’d love to do a G&SS thing out there, or just do an overnight camping with the Tribe, because it’s a fun spot.
The aftermath, of course, was getting the money and figuring out just how bad the damages were. I do give Jeremy and Fernando credit: they put together an expense report, as should happen after every show, really, detailing where the money had gone and what we’d made. The only trouble was that they were about £50 off on the actual amount in the cash box, which is a problem, and we’re still trying to figure out how to handle that. And some of the expenses just didn’t need to happen. Like, we always serve refreshments at the interval, and they come from Poundland. Except that they went to Morrison’s, which is much pricier. And they spent as much on having the cast use taxis in one night as they did to get a bus for all of us for two. And I swear the audience must’ve been driven out in limos, because their transportation cost more than the venue and properties put together.
Which, all told, means that Lords lost somewhere in the neighbourhood of £450. It’d be closer to five, but Jeremy magnanimously (note the dripping sarcasm) agreed to eat about £70 worth of the expensive food he bought for the interval. This means they lost more in this show than my initial budget for Apollonius. In fact, they lost more than half their agreed upon budget (which, of course, they went over by fifty percent). How this will impact upon the summer show remains to be seen. I feel bad for Strasz and Kats, having to deal with that, although they seem to be taking it pretty well in stride. We went through the closet for costumes yesterday morning and they seem quite amenable to cutting costs left, right, and centre. I told them about where we can get free staging, and that they don’t need to hire seating, and it appears that a lot of what we have in the closet can either be used or cannibalised. They want to keep their show under £600 (take note, Jeremy and Fernando!), which is a distinct necessity at this point.
So, when it’s all said and sifted, was this a success? Financially, obviously, the answer is no. Personally, I would also argue against it being a glorious triumph, because this show was like a highway to bleeding ulcers. We ripped our hair out and were driven to drink and threatened mayhem more times over this one than any other show I’ve done in my life. (And I thought last summer was vexing!) But the audiences loved it. (James’s parents said it was one of the funniest things they’ve ever seen.) And the cast did have fun, at least Friday and Saturday nights, because at that point, you can’t unscramble eggs and might as well just go for the moment. So it depends upon your definition of success. I tend to take a mixed view of it: the audience had better be satisfied, but I want the cash box to be fattened, too. However, from a purely artistic standpoint, I’m tempted to say that we made the audience happy, and that, in the end, the most important thing.
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